For the most part, college life had broadened all of the girls, so that none of them were entirely content to lead a perfectly useless life of fashion and gayety. Constance herself had gone into college settlement work, just as she had planned to do long before.
After the rest of their classmates had gone, Mary and the “diggers” (for the old name seemed still to cling to them) stayed for a cosy chat with Constance. Beth and Dolly, indeed, would stay for a couple of days longer.
They were sipping tea, which Constance had insisted on making, when her sharp eyes caught the gleam of a new ring on Margaret’s finger. “Who gave you that, Meg? Are you keeping secrets from your crowd? I wouldn’t have believed it of you.”
Margaret flushed richly. “I truly meant to tell you girls before I left tonight, but it was not easy to tell someway. It is absurd to think of it, but really, I am going, if nothing happens, to be Abby Dunbar’s sister some day.”
“Margaret! how lovely! no, not that you will be her sister, but that you will be Raymond Dunbar’s wife, for he is as broad and generous and fine as she is petty and narrow.”
“I congratulate you with all my heart, Meg, and I am so glad that Abby married that Englishman and will live abroad. Raymond is just the one man in all the world that you should marry.”
“Thank you a thousand times, girls,” Margaret said heartily when she had been duly kissed and hugged. “But you know really, that he is much better and nobler than I. It is so, and you need not try to contradict me. I thought at first that he was trying in this way to atone for his father’s youthful faults, but–”
“But you do not think so any more,” Dolly said shrewdly, looking at her friend’s changing face.
“No, I do not,” Margaret owned softly.
Constance looked around on the other faces. “Now I wonder if any more of you are hiding weighty secrets. If so, confess!”